One Pickup

I have what may be a stupid question. I have a bass that currently has two stock soapbars in it. I want to replace the preamp with the 3-way Bartolini and I was thinking about changing the pickups also. Here's the thing, I mostly play with the bridge pickup and I am thinking about only changing that for now to a Bartolini. Is this some crazy unheard of modification or can I get away with this. I guess money is the issue here so I am trying to keep it reasonable and just changing one pickup seems like the way to go. Opinions please.

I forgot to ask. The pickups I need are the Bartolini M4 shape. This is 1.5" X 4.00". This pick up is available for 5 string basses. My bass is a 6 string. Will a pickup designed for 5 string work with a six string?

Originally posted by meekster The Bartolini 72M45C and 72M45CX will work if your total string width is less than 72 mm.

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72mm for a sixer would certainly count as a narrow string width

You could also check out EMG pickups, the 40HZ passive or the EMG-40P, EMG-40J, EMG-40DC active soapbars. http://www.emgpickups.com

As to your original question about only changing one pickup, there's no reason why not. You can run into impedance issues if mixing active and passive pickups, or wiring issues if mixing matching some oddly wired pickups like Villex.

But apart from that you should consider the following possible issues:

differences in output levels

hum cancelling issues i.e. are you replacing one pickup of a single coil hum cancelling set (where one pup is reverse wound) with a humbucker.